Germantown Community farm is a small farm and homestead stewarded by a collective in New York's Hudson Valley. GCF is the response of local food activists, artists, and farmers to global systems of exploitation and oppression. We work to build and support a just regenerative local economy and create vital community. germantownhouse@gmail.com

Monday, June 11, 2007

The Water Underground Tour 2007 Comes to Germantown Community Farm

here was the invite

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/garden/31greywater.html

You are cordially invited to a work party/skillshare/presentation as our west coast friends come and help us fix our hurtin’ greywater system and share a bunch of stories and knowledge from their work as water activists.

This is part of their tour to promote their recently published book:Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground by Soft Skull Press

Friday Night June 8th Potluck Dinner with...* A slideshow featuring anti-dam struggles, ecological sanitation, and river restoration projects* A discussion of local restoration work• A showing of Demise of Dam Nation, a compilation of cinematic dam failures and catastrophes

From Boliva to South Africa, local single-issue water fights have exploded into demands for new water commons. The Water Underground Tour 2007 presents a water philosophy roadshow and resistance forum that will kindle this spirit in North America. A grassroots network of strategic and material exchange, which recognizes watersheds as social and ecological responsibility units, can decolonialize the concept of appropriate technology and demonstrate the potential of an international water culture.

Then the Next Morning....Saturday June 9th we’ll have a Work Party/Skillshare and Rebuild Our House Greywater System

The Greywater Guerrillas began in 1999 as an amateur plumbing andecological design collective, founded by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and LauraAllen. Dozens of low-tech water-recycling installations, and years ofdesigning and touring, yielded the Guerrilla Greywater Girls' Guide toWater, an 80 page DIY zine and introduction to water politics. TheGuerrillas designed the first small-scale urban greywater systems toincorporate greywater diversion, biological sewage treatment via wetlands,wildlife habitat creation, and backyard food forests. The Guerrillasexpanded their vision of radical water activism as they met and talkedwith river restoration, ecological sanitation, anti-privatization, andanti-dam movements around the globe. It was time for another book: onethat synthesized a radical history of water with DIY sustainabletechnologies.

Dam Nation is a people's history of water—and the water grid. Tracing therise of mega-dams and their spread across five continents, the book alsochronicles the inevitable popular opposition to this philosophy ofappropriation and control. Blocking the neoliberal makeover of our world,beleaguered commoners fight to reclaim the earth's arteries, lakes, andseas. Their struggles, strategies, and successes form the backbone of Dam Nation. The authors weave together a detailed accounting of thefallout from a century of river blockages and diversions with mulitlayeredanalysis of water movements around the world.. Dam Nation blows open thescarcity myth to show how democratic management and local control of waterresources can provide water for everyone and make the rivers we've killedlive again.

Both radical history of water and DIY guide to sustainable technologies,Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground combines an analysis ofwater's history with the active fight for its future. Bringing togetherhundreds of national and international projects, organizations, andstrategies, Dam Nation investigates political economy an d environmentalimpact of water consumption. It also gives readers easy, cheap, andthought-provoking ways to join the 'water underground' themselves. Thebook illustrates:

* How corrupt water policy led to bloody battles during the settlementof the American West * How a Michigan town being drained by the Nestle Corporation isfighting to block water privatization nationwide * How to reuse household water to create lush gardens * How to build a composting toilet and a pedal-powered washing machine * How to cultivate a pond filled with edible plants andmosquito-eating fish * How residents jump started municipal eco-projects in such diverselocales as Tijuana, Mexico City, Zimbabwe and Arcata, California * How a 'protest village' in Thailand and a neighborhood associationin Louisiana both beat back dam and canal expansion with grassrootsorganizing * How a coalition of Native American tribes organized crossculturally, leading Scottish shareholders to stand up for tribalsalmon rights• And much more

About the authors:Cleo Woelfle-Erskine is a Bay Area based writer, teacher, restorationist,and agitator.In 1996, he left his native Los Angeles to study traditionalagriculture and water harvesting in the Rio Grande basin, then continuedpermaculture pursuits in filled-in marshes edging the San Francisco Bay.His books include Urban Wilds: Gardener's Stories of the Struggle for Landand Justice (water/under/ground, 2001), the kids' book Sink or Swim: AHistory of Sausal Creek (water/under/ground, 2004) and the infamous TheGuerrilla Graywater Girls' Guide to Water zine (with Laura Allen). Hiswater conservation projects have been featured in The Utne Reader and TheSan Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Times.

July Oskar Cole learned to swim in the TVA lakes of Eastern Kentucky andTennessee, and to identify wild plants in the forests of the CumberlandPlateau. He learned most of the rest in the deserts of the U.S. Southwest:philosophy and astronomy in the Sangre de Cristo foothills, alternativebuilding and "charco" style greywater practices in the Rio Grande bosque,and in the Basin and Range territory more things than can be listed. Inthe San Francisco Bay Area, he keeps bees, designs and installs greywatertreatment wetlands, and sells books. He co-edited Dam Nation: Dispatchesfrom the Water Underground, and has also been published in ColorLinesmagazine and the 2006 Best Gay Erotica anthology.

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About Me

For a rural community to thrive in the 21st century, we need to work within traditional models of self-sufficiency while simultaneously building broader social networks. We want to create a physical space and a forum for community sufficiency. We are examining the intersection between the cultivated and the wild, working to implement more simple and sustainable systems. These 60 acres are currently home to three small farm businesses. Check out Fog and Thistle Farm, Fellow Workers Farm, and Anarchy Apiaries.